Satoshi Kanazawa: Difference between revisions

Satoshi Kanazawa
Born	(1962-11-16) November 16, 1962
Scientific career
Fields	Evolutionary psychology
Institutions	London School of Economics

Satoshi Kanazawa PhD (born November 16, 1962) is a Reader in Management at the London School of Economics. His work uses evolutionary psychology to analyze social sciences such as sociology, economics, and anthropology. Some of his work dealing with race and gender has been controversial and led to his dismissal from writing for Psychology Today.

Kanazawa has been a fierce opponent of what he considers political correctness. Much of his work is not considered mainstream evolutionary psychology. In response to ongoing controversy, his current employer, the London School of Economics, has prohibited him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets for 12 months.

Work

Kanazawa has co-written three books with Alan Miller:

• "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire— Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do" ;
• "Why Men Gamble and Women Buy Shoes: How Evolution Shaped the Way We Behave"; and
• "Order by Accident: The Origins and Consequences of Conformity in Contemporary Japan".

He also wrote a blog, The Scientific Fundamentalist, for Psychology Today until his dismissal in 2011.

Kanazawa uses the term Savanna principle to denote the theory that societal difficulties exist because the human brain evolved in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, a drastically different environment from today's urban, industrial society.

In 2003, in an article in the Journal of Research in Personality, he claimed to show that scientists generally made their biggest discoveries before their mid-30s, and compared this productivity curve to that of criminals.

Attractiveness and sex of offspring

In 2006, he published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, claiming that attractive people are 26% less likely to have male offspring.

In a letter to the editors regarding Kanazawa's claim that attractive people are more likely to have daughters, Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman points out that a correct interpretation of the regression coefficients in Kanazawa's analysis is that attractive people are 8% more likely to have girls, an error that Kanazawa acknowledges. Gelman argues that Kanazawa's analysis does not convincingly show causality, because of possible endogeneity as well as problematic interpretations of statistical significance in multiple comparisons. While Kanazawa claims that the former error is "merely linguistic" and that he addressed the latter two in his initial article, Gelman maintains that his original criticism remains valid.

Race and attractiveness

In May 2011, he published an article in Psychology Today that explored why black women had been rated less attractive than those of other races in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and hypothesized that the rater's preference for physical markers of estrogen levels, which he asserted were lower in blacks, was the culprit. Subsequent critical independent analysis of the results showed that the difference in assessed attractiveness held for three of the four data sets in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and that there was only a statistically significant race difference in younger women and that it disappeared by early adulthood. His explanation has generally been considered incorrect as there is no evidence that black women have lower levels of estrogen than other groups. The article was extremely negatively received by various groups of scientists, including those who work in evolutionary psychology, who pointed out the errors in Kanazawa's work and sought to distance themselves from it. Psychology Today pulled the article and on May 27, 2011, issued an apology to anyone who had been offended and stated that they had not reviewed Kanazawa's article before its publication, and stated that they would police more strictly for controversial content in the future.

In September 2011, Kanazawa apologized to LSE director Judith Rees, saying he "deeply regrets" the "unintended consequences" of the blog and accepting that "some of [his] arguments may have been flawed and not supported by the available evidence". An internal LSE investigation found that Kanazawa had brought the school into disrepute and prohibited him from publishing in non-peer-reviewed outlets for a year.

Following the controversy, an open letter was signed by 68 evolutionary psychologists distancing themselves from Kanazawa and defending evolutionary psychology, writing "The principle of applying evolutionary theory to the study of human psychology and behaviour is sound, and there is a great deal of high-quality, nuanced, culturally-sensitive evolutionary research ongoing in the UK and elsewhere today". In response, an international team of 23 scientists published a letter in Times Higher Education defending Kanazawa's work.

Health and intelligence

In 2006, Kanazawa published a paper suggesting that the poor health of people in some nations is the result not of poverty, but of lower intelligence. In the British Journal of Health Psychology, George Ellison wrote that the theory is based on flawed assumptions, questionable data, inappropriate analysis and biased interpretations. Ellison wrote that Kanazawa mistook statistical associations for evidence of causality and falsely concluded that populations in sub-Saharan Africa are less healthy because they are unintelligent and not because they are poor. Kevin Denny wrote similar criticisms regarding the IQ data and stated that African Americans should have similar IQs when compared to the sub-Saharan African population and that Kanazawa should have measured the distance between areas in a topographical fashion.

External links

• "Is atheism linked to intelligence?" A review of Kanazawa's recent "Why liberals and atheists are more intelligent", Social Psychology Quarterly 73(1): 33-57.
• Video interview at Big Think